How I (unintentionally) quit yoga and what it taught me about being white
I lived in Melbourne the year I turned twenty, waitressing and doing on-call childcare, before returning to university back home. Looking back, that year feels like a different life, one where I still struggled silently with body image and anxiety in such palpable, day-to-day ways. A friend I worked with knew I was having a hard time and offered to take me to a yoga class. We arrived to a brightly lit studio, with a lithe white man in his sixties as our instructor. That first time on the mat, the practice touched a place of longing in me and offered some much-needed grounding for my buzzing nervous system. That was the start of a nearly 20-year Ashtanga yoga asana practice.
Yoga regulated me; it made me feel strong and present, and offered me community and belonging in a spiritual practice. I am so grateful to have had that access, and for the teachings (however incomplete) that found their way to me, and the teachers who helped me find a way to know my body that wasn’t rooted in shame.
Yoga helped me feel pleasure in my body, practicing got me out of my head and slowed down the negative thoughts that often consumed me.
I loved the long silence of pigeon pose, and how it felt to stretch deep into the crevices of my hips, as though I were rinsing them out as I softened and dropped into connection at my center. I loved sweeping my arms above my head during sun salutations, feeling my heart open and experiencing a sense of wonder at all the bodies moving together — a swell of power and reverence as the room moved in unison.
About ten years into my practice, I started noticing conversations online and at my local studio about yoga and cultural appropriation. I read blogs, listened to South Asian teachers talk about the roots of the practice and the impacts of yoga being stripped of its spiritual context. I read deeply about whiteness and the colonization of this practice that I loved, but knew incompletely. Genuinely troubled by what I was learning, I intentionally took classes with BIPOC instructors, donated funds, and did my best to integrate my values while continuing to practice. And admittedly, I sometimes ignored my values so I could have access to something that I loved. I kept practicing, but a seed of discomfort had been planted.
Just under two years ago, I stopped practicing yoga. It was unplanned and mostly unconscious. I’d felt a growing discomfort with the prevalence of appropriation, cissexism, whitewashing, and fatphobia in the yoga world. I wasn’t feeling connected to the practice in the same way, and my curiosity was leading me towards other forms of embodied dance and movement. When the pandemic began, I didn’t have the energy to do a full hour of class from home. I wanted something subtler, and more implicit in my movement practice. I’d also begun to explore my ancestry in embodied ways, feeling for connection and relationship with my Soviet German, Irish and British ancestors and the ancient practices of Germanic and Celtic peoples. The more I explored these other paths of embodiment, the more yoga just kind of fell away.
My friend Bear Hebert is a former yoga teacher. As a white person, they quit teaching because of a growing discomfort around appropriation and wrote a series of blog posts about their decision. One thing they wrote about really stood out to me:
Practicing yoga and other traditions outside of our own lineages keeps white people from having to really feel the grief of cultural loss and un-belonging.
For a long time I was afraid to let go of yoga, because I didn’t know what would take its place. I longed for teachings, protocols, records, of what my own ancestral embodiment practices might have been. All I found when asking this question though, was a void. Imperialist nostalgia* is the idea that mourning something we have participated in destroying leads to a type of innocent yearning, that obscures our role or complicity in the destruction of Indigenous ways of life. In my yearning to join with the lineage of yoga and all it entails, I was unintentionally obscuring the role of whiteness in both the exploitation of this practice as well as in the loss of my own ancestral traditions. In essence, I was able to skip over feeling into that void of loss and un-belonging, by reaching for a commodified version of a practice I had no cultural ties to. In March of 2020 I had a conversation with a mentor who has been unpacking the colonization of healing traditions for many years. I shared this reflection with her about my participation in imperialist nostalgia. She nodded in recognition and then said “yes, but what makes a people want to destroy another culture?” In that moment, a new path of inquiry opened in my practice.
In her article, “Towards a Critical Embodiment of Decolonizing Yoga” Sheena Sood brings nuance to the complex history of yoga, and invites a practice of engaging directly with ancestral legacies. She says:
“The truth is that woven into many of our family legacies are narratives of the colonizer and the colonized. It is up to us to take these inherited legacies and use them as tools to awaken to deeper ancestral truths, rather than bypass them. In order to heal and transform ancestral legacies of oppressive harm, we must be committed to awakening to the multiplicity of these truths.”
I hear in Sood’s words the call to name our legacies fully — with honesty and integrity — and to use the teachings they offer us to continue to peel back the layers of our inheritance, to understand how we embody our histories. In a way, we use our practices to decolonize those very practices.
Can we envision what embodiment looks and feels like beyond yoga?
So how do we, as white people, connect with body-based practices from outside of our cultures beyond appropriation? And how do we engage with the tools and practices of our own lineages, when so many of us are cut off from those traditions, and so much has been lost? I have felt the profound disconnection that lies at the center of white bodies, and I have searched around the edges of nothingness and felt for words to describe the numbness that I experience there. I have witnessed my body’s impulse to shut down, for my mind to find solutions to get away from the feelings of grief and emptiness that open up when I consider these questions.
Some somatics teachers are beginning to name whiteness as a deep freeze state in the body, which, when touched, can overwhelm the nervous system (Newell; Menakem). On the surface, this response can appear as fragility, but I am interested in what lies underneath that. What happened to us that made acknowledging our whiteness so intolerable? To such a degree that we mobilize violence to avoid feeling this discomfort?
What is the freeze protecting us from? And how do we start to feel again?
Whiteness holds power through invisibility and silence, and through the disconnection of white people from much else to find belonging in, thus keeping us complicit even when our hearts may long for something different. Whiteness is identity, ideology, and institution. It is culture, it is embodied, it is ephemeral and changing, and it is a socially constructed category with very real and violent impacts.
Whiteness is encoded even in how we talk about and practice embodiment. What do we mean by this term? Embodiment is shaped by culture, and if we aren’t explicit about the cultural contexts of our practices, we risk violently enforcing domination even through body-based healing (Sherrell, 2018)*. As Bear Hebert succinctly states; “What needs to be reconciled is our relationship as white people with our outsized racial entitlement. What needs to be transformed is our cultural and somatic bereftness”.
When I let go of yoga, I started to feel my way through the emptiness and void that was left, and asked for direction and guidance from my ancestors. The truth is, many of us don’t have a set of practices to revive and return to, and that is precisely the point. Some days I practice improvised movement, some I stretch, or lay my hands on my own body and listen for what emerges. I dance, I walk, I feel for bones, fluid, midline. I weep and touch the edge of a grief bigger than anything I’ve known. I research, I gather bits of learning to bring to my practice, and through each of these small acts, the old ones, my beloved dead, are helping me to remember.
Lately I am learning about the Cauldron of Poesy, and fascinated by the witches’ sabbath. I approach these practices slowly, asking permission, listening for somatic cues, exploring what it means to build consent with these practices. Far more careful I humbly admit, than I was on the mat during that first yoga class.
I have said goodbye to a practice that kept me afloat through many hard times, a practice that served as a bridge for me back to my own body, for which I feel a deep gratitude and responsibility.
All those years practicing yoga are part of what shaped me and helped me to grow the capacity to release it for a practice that feels more aligned, more liberatory. It’s not for me to decide who should or shouldn’t practice yoga, or whether or not something is appropriation. Those questions can serve as distractions, virtue signalling that keeps us from the work of divesting from the roots of whiteness that lead to appropriation in the first place. I do know that the space that was left when I quit yoga made room for a new kind of connection to emerge that feels much more rooted in my values, and my lineage. I am not sure how we can approach practices such as yoga as white people without having something to share in return. A practice entails a relationship, if we don’t know who we are or where we come from, how can we really engage in mutual connection?
When I don’t know where to go or I feel lost, I bring that to my practice. The loss and nothingness are part of what my body is directing me towards, and I can feel myself exploring that void, grieving disconnection, and a stream of sensation and memory slowly returning to places that long to come back to life.
Sherrell, C. (2018). The oppression of black bodies: The demand to simulate white bodies and white embodiment. In C. Caldwell and Leighton, L. (Eds.) Oppression and the Body: Roots, Resistance, and Resolutions. North Atlantic Books.
Imperialist Nostalgia: a mood of nostalgia that makes racial domination appear innocent and pure; people mourning the passing or transformation of what they have caused to be transformed. Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody and then mourns the victim; or someone deliberately alters a life form and then regrets that things have not remained as they were. . . Imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of "innocent yearning" both to capture peoples' imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination (R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis)